


war: a sketchbook

by tomato_greens



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-01
Updated: 2014-08-01
Packaged: 2018-02-11 06:44:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2057907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky's never had more leisure time than fighting the goddamn Nazis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	war: a sketchbook

**Author's Note:**

> This work is an abandoned scene from a longer multimedia fic I'm working on. It's less a fic than a series of impressions. Take it as you will.

Nights, now, hunched over a fire or huddled in the corner of an abandoned farmhouse, Dernier’s been teaching Steve French. Steve explains that it’s mostly for the ciphers they use, which apparently means he ends up with a rough grasp of the grammar and a terrifically weird vocabulary. Bucky wouldn’t know. 

“Bien sûr, mais je préfère l'encornet,” Dernier says.

Steve dutifully repeats it; even Bucky can hear the accent’s all wrong. Dernier sighs. Jones cracks up. 

* * *

Bucky had thought that boot camp taught him everything he needed to know about _Hurry up and wait,_ but the upper brass putting greenies through their paces have nothing on the strange, halting rhythm of warfare. Time spans out in hazy elongated triangles before snapping back to linear; he’s never had more leisure time than fighting the goddamn Nazis.

“You’re doing real good, Buck,” Steve will tell him, clapping him on the shoulder the same way he claps Monty and Falstaff and Jones and Dernier and Morita on their shoulders. Friendly. Respectful. A little distant, maybe. Turns out Steve is a born leader once you give him a body people think worth listening to, and leaders, not just people who can layer on the charisma like Bucky but the real deal, can’t afford to have attachments outside of the cause. 

“So don’t you ruin this for him,” Peggy Carter had concluded, her hand still bunched in his coat collar from when she’d cornered him just outside the Whip and Fiddle. “It would be difficult for me to care less what you get up to on your own time, or who you fuck. Who you let fuck you,” she’d said knowingly, not unkindly. Bucky had flinched away from her. “But we need him. I will win this war without him if I have to, Sergeant Barnes. But don’t you dare make me.”

Bucky had nodded stiffly, had retreated. He’s been alive a hundred years if he’s been alive twenty-seven, and he’s cashed them all in on someone who doesn’t exist anymore. He and Steve don’t––usually, they don’t, or anyway they don’t like they did before. Steve doesn’t seem to notice, exactly. He still reaches for Bucky whenever they have an outside chance for privacy, and Bucky has never found a way to tell Steve, _No_. 

* * *

He loses entire days with his limbs on autopilot and his mind––away; he blinks awake only to find that he’s pitched a tent, marched thirty miles, decoded Peggy’s latest missive or the latest objective passed on by the Resistance. Sometimes Peggy sends on a message for Steve’s eyes only, and Bucky finds himself wondering idly whether Steve’s ever thought about it, how they’d look, fair and dark hair spread together on the linens from Peggy’s marriage chest as Steve rolled his hips into hers. Does Peggy even have a marriage chest? But she has to, Bucky figures. Even the poorest women Bucky knows have something tucked aside for their wedding day, and Peggy might have learned to seem tough as nails but she didn’t come by it honestly. 

Bucky’s hair isn’t long enough to tangle with Steve’s and they’ve never owned anything nice enough to be called linens. They haven’t done anything you might even conservatively term fucking in months. Steve doesn’t think it’s right to do too much when the rest of the men are dumb out of luck. _They have their right hands_ , Bucky’d said. _But I have yours_ , Steve had answered, kissing Bucky’s fingertips, _and that’s enough for me_. And oh, hadn’t Bucky felt small.

* * *

Bucky doesn’t even know if the rest of the unit knows. 

* * * 

The night before Bucky shipped out, he’d dragged Steve out to the Stark Expo. Well, Steve, and Agnes and Rose Marie, girls from the neighborhood who minded their own business in exchange for a soda and a night out at the dance halls. Agnes had been tugging him towards the popcorn stand when a complicated diagram worked out in red and blue caught his attention. The presenter, who was decked out in a white lab coat and fairly vibrating with enthusiasm, looked straight at him and clearly smelled fresh meat, because he said, “Young man, _what_ do you know about the _atom_?”

“Uh,” Bucky had said, because although he’d bought every issue of _Marvel Science Stories_ released between 1935 and 1941 he didn’t want to admit so in front of Agnes.

“The _distance_ between _atoms_ ––the very building blocks of _matter itself_ , that is to say, everything––is much _vaster_ than we can quite comprehend on a _visual level_ ,” the presenter said.

“Yeah?” Bucky replied in spite of himself. Agnes, next to him, sighed.

“ _Yes_ ,” the presenter continued, and reached out to grab Bucky’s arm. Bucky was wearing his uniform; people didn’t usually touch him like this. But he let himself be drawn in. “Oh, yes, you see––when I _touch_ your _arm_ , it looks and feels _solid_ , don’t you see?” Bucky gamely pokes at forearm and nods. “But were we to look _closer_ , were we to _plumb_ the _depths_ of your arm and look at what it’s _made_ of, you would see the _vast space_ between each _particle_.”

“Yeah?” Bucky repeated, and looked closer at his arm. “How do you know?”

“ _Science_ , my dear boy! Don't you know? _Great work_ is being done with the _atom_!”

Bucky didn’t know. He looked at his arm again, which Agnes was now flat-out yanking. “Come on, Sarge, we’re not smart enough for this,” she’d said, a rough edge to her giggle; she didn’t want to stand here listening to this man. Bucky let himself be pulled towards Rose Marie and Steve, who were bobbing awkwardly at the popcorn stand. At any rate, it wasn’t like Bucky could feel the gaps when he touched his arm, so who cared if they were there or not?

* * *

Then again, how could they not know? Steve Rogers wouldn’t recognize subtlety if it punched him in the nose. And if Bucky’s being honest, once the leather tights are out of the way, Steve can’t say _no_ to him either. 

* * *

After eighteen months’ worth of empty time shot through with spiky adrenaline and bright sudden bursts of danger, Bucky thinks he’s starting to understand the space between atoms.

Someday, when the war is over––Bucky might have dropped out at sixteen but he went to enough history classes to know that all wars end eventually––the fighting will be the only thing anyone cares about, but it won’t be the only thing that mattered.

**Author's Note:**

> Marvel Science Stories was a real magazine, although it was actually only run 1938-1941. And many thanks to the [#antidiogenes](http://antidiogenes.tumblr.com) chat, every member of whom is a marvel.


End file.
